At twenty-two, Gabriel Maday graduated from Benedictine College and is about to leave for the Bronx, where he will spend a year teaching at a tuition-free public charter school in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods while continuing his discernment with the Dominican Order. The Dominicans have asked him to spend the year living in community as a Seton Teaching Fellow before taking the next step in his vocation. The coming year will test whether that calling is truly where God is leading him.

The placement is not incidental. “The beauty of that is I’ll be in the Eastern Province of the Dominicans, which has a big presence in Manhattan,” he said. “I’m really excited to be that close.”

For many Catholics, the word vocation calls to mind a priest at the altar or a sister in a classroom. What goes mostly unseen are the years before: the prayer, the formation, the small faithful decisions that prepare a person for God’s call. Gabriel’s story offers a window into that journey. We met him not at the end of his discernment, but in the middle of it.

His mother, Beth, says it started at five. Gabriel says seven. Either way, it started early — a quiet certainty, held loosely at first, that the priesthood was where he was headed. Most childhood dreams fade with time. Gabriel’s came into focus.

His parents built the foundation. His father, Rev. Mr. Jason Maday, was ordained a permanent deacon in April 2026. A cradle Catholic, he deepened his faith through study. His mother converted to Catholicism before they married. The household prayed the rosary every evening, and Adoration was a regular practice. “They were both the head and the heart guiding me and my two younger sisters.”

He received his First Communion at seven and was serving at the altar the following weekend. He has served ever since. The roots of his vocation, as he understands them, run directly through that experience — the liturgy, the nearness of it, the demand it placed on him to take God’s worthiness seriously. “I don’t want the liturgy to be beautiful for my sake,” he said, “but because God deserves so much more than we can give Him.”

His pastor, Fr. Libby, shaped him too. “He never asks us to do something that he isn’t doing himself,” Gabriel said. “Which is huge in formation.”

Those years of quiet formation eventually led to a defining moment. During a freshman theology class in high school, something unexpected happened. A general discussion on religious orders — no particular drama, no preparation for what followed. Then, in the middle of it, something settled over him: an overwhelming love and desire for the Dominicans. It lasted only fifteen seconds. Later that day, during science class, it returned and stayed for fifteen minutes.

The conviction remained, but the path was anything but straightforward. He visited the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio to explore diocesan priesthood. “I was miserable the whole weekend,” he said plainly. The diocesan life was not his calling; once he accepted that, something else opened. “Once I realized that I was made for communal life and I began to fall in love with study — which ultimately includes teaching, preaching, and being out in the world — the more I realized that religious life was my call, specifically with the Dominicans.”

He spent years among the Benedictines in college, and he loves them with evident sincerity. But prayer kept returning him to the same answer. “The Lord kept saying, ‘You could, but that’s not what I’ve made your heart for.’” Even then, he never experienced it as coercion. “The choice was always mine.”

Gabriel thinks Catholics misunderstand what it means for a man to enter religious life. Women entering religious communities is familiar enough; men doing the same is less understood. “At least for men, the vocation is for a specific community, not to be a priest or a monk,” he said. “It’s the community that you fall in love with, and it can be thought of as coming home. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you are a Dominican, or you’re a Jesuit, or a Benedictine.”

His daily life already reflects that orientation. The rosary is, as he puts it, the “non-negotiable of non-negotiables.” “Even if I don’t make it to Mass, I’ll always pray the rosary. It has transformed my life and my vocation.” He prays the Office of Readings and Evening Prayer, pursues Eucharistic Adoration when he can, and ends each day with an examination of conscience.

Benedictine College formed him in other ways. Professors, monks, choir directors, and spiritual mentors each helped shape the man he was becoming. But serving as a resident assistant became one of his most important classrooms — relational, humbling, less tidy than intellectual growth alone.

“Prior to college I think I wasn’t the most charitable person. Things were very black and white. Being an RA made me more charitable, and I was able to open up to people and just say I love you. It was very humbling. I had to learn how to meet people where they were at and love them.”

For all that the Benedictines gave him, leaving them was its own kind of grief. “I truly wish I was called to that order because I love all of them and it was an amazing time,” he said. “But I just wasn’t called to the Benedictine life.”

Ask Gabriel what drew him to the Dominicans and he answers without hesitation: the integration of prayer and study, the conviction that the two are not competing claims on a man’s time. “I love how prayer and study are not separate, and the conclusion of that is to go out and tell the world.”

Study, in the Dominican tradition, is itself an act of sacrifice. He quoted a saying he has carried with him: “There’s a beautiful saying in the Dominican community that the wood of the desk is the wood of the cross — meaning that blood, sweat and tears are poured out in your study.”

He is twenty-two years old. He has a classroom in the Bronx, a community to live with, and a year ahead of him that will test everything he believes God is calling him to become. He hopes to keep serving at the altar and cantoring if the opportunity arises, but, as he put it, the community comes first.

The next year will ask much of him. As he seeks to follow God’s will wherever it leads, we invite you to keep Gabriel in your prayers as we look forward to the next chapter of his story.